New Look at Sam Raimi’s Return to Horror After 17 Years Drops Ahead of Release: Watch The Trailer

Sam Raimi was shot out of a cannon into the horror genre in 1981 with The Evil Dead, a film that announced his presence as one of the most unique voices of the decade. He quickly followed it up with Evil Dead II six years later, and continues to operate in the franchise he created. After Army of Darkness and The Gift, though, Raimi quickly changed the comic book genre as a director with the Spider-Man trilogy, only returning to horror with 2009’s Drag Me to Hell and largely working as a producer in horror over the past twenty-five years.

Through his Ghost House Pictures banner, Raimi has had a hand in bringing audiences The Grudge franchise, 30 Days of Night, Don’t Breathe, and Crawl, solid horror entries that continue to startle viewers today. Raimi took an extended break from directing himself after 2013’s OZ The Great and Powerful, only to return in 2022 with Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Though he flirted with horror in sequences of in the MCU sequel, it’s still been nearly twenty years without a proper entry from him. That all changes in just a few weeks, when the Sam Raimi-directed Send Help is released in theaters.

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Sam Raimi’s Send Help Marks His Horror Return After Almost Two Decades

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20th Century Studios has released the full trailer for Send Help, the new Raimi horror film that stars Rachel McAdams & Dylan O’Brien. What sets this new movie apart from Raimi’s other films in the genre is clear immediately, while the likes of The Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell dealt with supernatural entities and feature maximalist tendencies in terms of tone and style, this one is totally different. Send Help appears to not only be a survival horror movie, but one that has almost nothing to do with ghosts, spirits, or demons.

In Send Help, two colleagues become stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash, where their past as co-workers collides with their will to survive. McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, a woman whose trip up the corporate ladder appears to be stalling out after Dylan O’Brien’s Bradley Preston takes the reins of the company from his deceased father (a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from Raimi regular Bruce Campbell). That in-office tension overlaps with the reality of being stranded, clearly making way for Raimi to play with fun social satire once again (something he worked with in the plot of Drag Me to Hell as well)

Written by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (Freddy vs Jason, Friday the 13th) and featuring an original score by Danny Elfman (the tenth collaboration between Raimi and Elfman), Send Help arrives in theaters on January 30, but you can snag tickets to an “early sneak preview” on January 24 now.